The Academy's new rule changes will see voters watch every eligible movie and the new casting category will have 10 nominees – but we're still uncertain how AI will be treated at the Oscars.

Onirikal Studio showcased their exceptional artistry in Amazon Prime Video’s Punto Nemo, delivering stunning visual effects that bring the ocean’s mysteries to life. The VFX reel reveals the complex blend of digital elements used to craft this underwater world — from realistic fluid simulations to an intense shipwreck sequence.The team pushed technical boundaries with detailed smoke, bubbles, and marine life, creating immersive underwater shots that feel both cinematic and authentic. One standout element is the digital creature that adds a layer of wonder and tension to the story.The visuals elevate the drama, giving audiences the sense of depth and danger hidden beneath the waves. The combination of artistic vision and technical precision from Onirikal’s crew played a major role in shaping the gripping world of Punto Nemo, leaving viewers captivated by both the storytelling and its breathtaking effects. The post Behind the VFX of Punto Nemo by Onirikal Studio appeared first on Vfxexpress.

Popular language learning app Duolingo is giving its bite-size lesson treatment to one of the oldest games in the world: chess.Duolingo’s chess course will take users, who can range from complete novices to those with a solid understanding of how to play, through its gamified exercises to become better game players. The focus is mostly on attracting new players, including those who have felt chess is too difficult to learn or otherwise inaccessible.“For the most part, a lot of chess products out there are usually built by an advanced user for more advanced-use cases—someone who already is familiar with chess and is kind of trying to elevate their abilities even further,” Edwin Bodge, Duolingo senior product manager, tells Fast Company. “So we are more targeting beginners and think that we’re addressing a part of the market that hasn’t previously been addressed.”[Animation: Duolingo]Users can learn how each piece moves, spot tactical patterns, and build a strategy. They can then apply those lessons in “mini matches,” which are just a few minutes long, to full games against its character Oscar. The bot will track how many matches the user has won and lost and can scale up or down the difficulty based on past performance.“This is a game that’s been played for so long, and essentially Duolingo is now carrying the torch of [getting] more people interested in this game that has been around for so long and put our unique spin on it,” Bodge said.[Image: Duolingo]Chess is the company’s first new subject since it branched beyond languages and introduced math and music classes in 2022 and 2023, respectively. The company launched in 2012 and has amassed more than 37 million daily active users as it brought language learning to the iPhone age and leaned heavily into attracting a young user base.The company said that chess is the fastest course its developed to date thanks to advancements in AI. The product team pitched CEO Luis von Ahn on the course in late August and its first engineer started on the job in November.Duolingo is testing chess with a limited number of learners starting Tuesday. It’ll roll out to all learners on iOS in English in the coming weeks, it said, with plans to eventually extend to additional operating systems and other languages in the coming months.

The only company better than Google at leaking their own phone designs seems to be Carl Pei’s Nothing. After weeks of constant teasing different details of the Phone (3a) and (3a) Pro’s design, they’re back with their latest device from the company’s budget wing, CMF. The CMF Phone 2 is slated to launch on the 28th of this month, but Nothing decided to lift the veil on its design a week in advance, getting its Asia-focused market excited well in time to line up to buy the device. The CMF Phone 2 Pro (yes, the budget line has a Pro variant too) was officially revealed in a video on Twitter (do we still have to call it X?), showcasing two beautiful colorways – white and that eye-catching orange. The design is a masterclass in iterative evolution. The overall flavor of the phone remains the same, with the plastic body, the customizable backplate, and the knob on the bottom right corner of the back. However, the camera layout gets a revamp, going from a capsule-shaped build to two individual metal rings and one capsule beside them. This confirms all past sources, bringing the camera count of this budget-beast to 3 lenses. Eggs might be expensive, but camera lenses apparently are a dime a dozen! Designer: CMF by Nothing While the camera layout hasn’t been particularly new information (we learnt about it more than a month ago), the new design reveals an interesting backplate upgrade. While last year’s model had a single-color backplate, punctuated by the camera layout and the knob at the bottom, the Phone 2 Pro’s design comes with a dual-tone finish. The orange and white variants both showcase an interplay between matte and metallic finishes on the backplate, giving the phone’s blockish form an exciting visual break. As an industrial designer, I absolutely love it – it’s exciting without looking gaudy (like some budget phones and their atrocious holographic shimmering backs). The design is subtle and sophisticated – something that still lets you set yourself apart as design-conscious even in the budget-phone category. CMF confirmed earlier that the Phone 2 Pro will be powered by MediaTek’s Dimensity 7300 Pro, a modest upgrade over the previous 7300. It’s a 6nm SoC built for efficiency and mid-range performance. It’s not flagship power, but it has enough punch to keep up with demanding games and multitasking, and that silky 120Hz display refresh rate CMF teased for battle royale enthusiasts. That detail alone places this phone squarely in the gamer-on-a-budget lane. The triple camera setup features a 50MP wide sensor, another 50MP telephoto lens with 2x optical zoom, and an 8MP ultrawide for those expansive cityscapes and group shots. Early samples teased with the tagline “Built for light, depth and detail” suggest a sensor configuration that leans hard into contrast and sharpness. If the software pipeline holds up, this could be one of the few affordable phones where the telephoto isn’t an afterthought. One element CMF hasn’t confirmed is whether that dual-tone design will extend to additional colors at launch. If orange and white are just the start, this might be a new wave of expressive hardware. CMF is pushing aesthetic diversity with functional depth—think Playdate meets Android. It feels like the next step for Nothing’s design-forward philosophy: take the playful transparency of the original Nothing Phone and evolve it into modular expressionism.The post Nothing Confirms CMF Phone 2 Pro Design with 3 Cameras and a Dual-tone Backplate first appeared on Yanko Design.

2D art of the week: Flintica.

Macworld AI tools are more powerful than ever, but the subscription fees add up fast. Instead of shelling out every month to use GPT-4 or Gemini Pro, you can get lifetime access to these heavy hitters through 1min.AI for just $79.97 (reg. $540), but only until April 30. Limiting yourself to just one AI tool means you’re missing out. Each model has its strengths—some are better at reasoning, others excel at creativity or speed. With 1min.AI, you don’t have to choose. You get access to GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-3.5, Google Gemini, Meta AI, DALL·E, and more, all from a single dashboard. Whether you’re writing content, generating images, running SEO analysis, or transcribing audio, having multiple AI tools at your fingertips means faster, better, and more accurate results. And when you’re ready to fine-tune your content, 1min.AI includes tools for video editing, background removal, image upscaling, and more. It’s everything you need to create, edit, and enhance without bouncing between apps or paying extra fees. You’ll even get free updates, so your toolkit stays ahead of the curve as AI keeps evolving. Pay once, use it for life — get 1min.AI Advanced Business for $79.97 (reg. $540), but only until April 30 at 11:59 p.m. PT. 1min.AI Advanced Business Plan Lifetime SubscriptionSee Deal StackSocial prices subject to change.

A Minnesota man is suing Apple for failing to do enough after having his iPhone stolen, demanding access to 2 terabytes of data and at least $5 million in damages.Advanced Data Protection is very secure, just don't lose your Recovery KeyThe loss of a smartphone can be devastating to a person, especially when it's the center of their digital existence. However, while there are ways to recover data, such as that stored on iCloud, sometimes the remedies that are available are not enough.In a filing at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in January, surfaced by the Washington Post in April, Michael Mathews of Minnesota is suing Apple for access to his data and compensation. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

While Bethesda has likely been hard at work on The Elder Scrolls 6 after having shipped Starfield back in 2023 and Shattered Space DLC in 2024, according to a former animator for the studio, Jeremy Bryant, the studio will likely not expand to work on the highly-anticipated RPG. In an interview with Kiwi Talkz, Bryant spoke about Bethesda’s system of acquiring smaller studios wholesale for more efficient game development rather than rapidly hiring a large amount of its own developers. For context, Bryant has previously worked on major Bethesda titles, including The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield. “Todd [Howard] has the vision for the game that he wants to make and he knows he needs X number of people to do it,” said Bryant (transcription via GamesRadar). “When you road map out what you’re going to do you can see if you need more devs, and it was obvious that we did. Probably the only way, really, to grow that fast is to kind of wholesale absorb, you can’t hire that fast I don’t think. It would be hard to hire onesies twosies and get up to the scale you needed.” When Bryant was asked if Bethesda would then scale up its headcount for the development for The Elder Scrolls 6, he responded, “I wouldn’t think so.” Bryant goes on to compare Bethesda’s process with that of Rockstar Games, which has traditionally hired several developers across various teams from animation to programming in order to ship its games. “[Rockstar] are such masters,” he said. “Their games are so polished. You always wonder, ‘how do they do it?’ GTA 6 yeah it’s taken like 10 years, I get it, but I went and looked at the credits for Red Dead and they had like 500 animators. There was like 80, 85 just gameplay animators and another 80 cinematic ones and another 100 face ones. Those team sizes, it’s bonkers. I think the overall dev size they said was around 1,600 I think on Red Dead 2.” “They conceivably have 3,000 people maybe working on GTA 6,” he continued. “How do all those people communicate and form any kind of bond at work when it’s just a random thousand people sitting shoulder to shoulder like on an assembly line? I don’t know, that doesn’t sound all that great to me. It sounds terrible.” Bethesda had announced The Elder Scrolls 6 all the way back in 2018. The game was announced with a short teaser trailer that, while not giving us any hints about its setting or gameplay, worked to confirm to the larger audience that yes, the studio will be working on the next game in the franchise at some point. Bethesda exec Pete Hines has referred to the project as a big and ambitious game in the past. He has stated that the title is still quite some time away. More recently, in 2023, current Microsoft Gaming head Phil Spencer said that The Elder Scrolls 6 was still more than 5 years off from release.

Duolingo, the world’s most popular learning app, is adding a new subject to its curriculum: Chess.Read More